


A Place and Time

by subito



Category: BOSCH Hieronymus - Works, The Garden of Earthly Delights - Hieronymus Bosch
Genre: Gen, Quests, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, That Hieronymus Bosch. What a weirdo.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:20:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21845815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/subito/pseuds/subito
Summary: All of them – flock and flowers, beasts and humans alike - bear witness to this beginning that starts with a crack in the ice.
Comments: 15
Kudos: 19
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	A Place and Time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [marginaliana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/marginaliana/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide!

A trumpet sounds. Tjaard lifts his blue hood and looks south towards the river. The heads of every member of the flock are turned towards it, mimicking irises near the fountain streams before they are eaten by beasts. All of them – flock and flowers, beasts and humans alike - bear witness to this beginning that starts with a crack in the icy surface.

They had all sensed that _something_ was about to happen. A whiff of disturbance had clung to every noise lately: The laughter coming from the high grass had sounded more hollow, the screams of those tormented much less afraid, the singing of leaves as tortured as nuns.

None of them had known just what it was and what to make of it; not least since there is no way of knowing these sort of things here, even for the flock and particularly when they concern questions of ‘when‘ and ‘where‘. The lands are vast and time in it is as fickle coloured as Inbal’s scales in the light.

Tjaard cranes his neck to see over the wall of instruments partially hiding Inbal from view. The specks of bronze he catches reveal her form as she is putting down the trumpet. There are uncharacteristic lines of worry on her cheeks as she looks up towards the horse’s skull.

Every creature’s eyes follow Inbal‘s gaze in dawning understanding and with the sense of horror that slithers into bones alongside knowledge. The key, eternally secured on the hook anchored in the orbit, has fallen. 

The flock had all seen the moments and watched, their blue robes aflutter with shock, the key dropping mercilessly slow into the water. Everyone else now sees the gaping hole and their experiences of metal on wood on flesh in all its variants do not prepare them for the gentle swallow of a liquid, whose crystals are still half-ice, half-other.

It is in this moment of the glistening metal touching the dull waters of the river that the world around them falls silent for the very first time. It only lasts a heartbeat this silence - then two, then ten, a thousand – as it radiates from the curious splinters in the flock’s midst.

When it comes rolling back like the tide, it’s thunderous in its retreat. It’s the noise of arrhythmically beating hearts, of held breaths that carried notes which are now broken, of fruits that open violently into mouths. It’s a noise so all-encompassing it will provide the only constant in the many moments to follow.

It is said the key belonged to a fisherman once who had an aptitude to fish for man and beast alike. He is said to have dived head-first into this same river – and the moment he was gone, the flock had appeared to start their duties.

In this world where everything is happening at once, it is their role to bring a sense of order to it. By consciously observing and examining everything and everyone, they help single acts to manifest in one way or another. They are there to be _present_ , to watch and watch over the world, neutral to any outcome.

In these lands everything that happens or doesn’t happen is free of judgement from any source besides what a creature themself judges their actions to be. The humans appearing in these lands are sometimes slow to shed their concepts. Some seem right at home, others start out naïve, all succumb in the end without fully understanding that it is not a progression, but simply the realisation of a potential that is innately human. All of them eat or drink or have intercourse with whatever is on offer. Putting these acts into a moral framework is as human a thing as perceiving time as one continuous stream and neither the flock nor anything else can influence that.

With potential realities being realised at every given time, it is perhaps inevitable for the one thing to happen that was not supposed to happen, Tjaard thinks, and watches the flock take hold of the novice whose duty it had been to look after the key at the moment of the fall. It had been his task to guard the key during the second sleep, yet a human had still found their way up the pike, collapsing inside the key’s eye from a drink or a death.

In the shadows and smoke beneath the horse’s skull, Ner is waving her lamp, signalling for the flock to move the novice along the river bank.

When the novice had tried to get the human off the key, he had slipped and caused the key to slip as well. Neither key nor human are anywhere to be seen now and the novice is meeting the same fate - except his disappearance will be caused by entering the pit below the throne after having been processed by Dardapt, the Devourer.

On his way along the river and up to the throne, the novice is being disrobed by beings neither human nor flock. The blue fabric of his vesture is torn to shreds by claws and teeth and tails too sharp to do anything but cut into his flesh and stain the rags purple. When the key had fallen, he had been stripped of his name immediately in a way that had felt just as visceral as the ordeal he is going through now. No longer Watcher-of-the-Key, but only ‘novice’, for he knows he will not exist long enough to be called by any other name in these lands ever again.

Tjaard knows the protocols, knows the details of how the novice will be pinched by Dardapt’s beak and gulped down in his entirety. Tjaard has no knowledge about what happens exactly during the processing, but he has observed, time and time again, how every creature who passes through Dardapt then disappears into the tarry hole beneath the throne. Where it leads has never been of any concern to any of them since many creatures appear and disappear at any moment.

Being processed by Dardapt isn’t a strange thing to happen and not everyone who falls into the pit under the throne does disappear for good. The very public way of the novice’s disappearance marks it as different and the omnipresent noise makes it hard to get a good reading on the reactions of the creatures watching when he is dipped, head-first like the man whose legacy he had failed to protect, into Dardapt’s maw. The noise distorts and shifts emotions, bodies, senses of place. Many faces bear a look of only mild interest, others have resumed their various activities altogether; only some watch wide-eyed with what is either horror or glee.

Turning his head around and missing the usual rustling of his robes, Tjaard is watching the birds in the west try to find the ways of their wings again, their formations having turned from the once smooth ribbon to scattered dots, galloping about the sky like the herds of game underneath. In the north, the flames licking at the mill seem to be frozen at first, just like the frozen river somehow seems ablaze now at certain moments when only a few eyes are upon it. Everything seems to be shifting and blurring together, losing its tethered state.

The strange movement of what has the possibility to be flames underneath the ice is the signal for Tjaard to, for the first time, act and physically influence the goings-on of these lands and creatures the flock otherwise only observe. Through the jagged hole in the ice a light red haze is visible, an open wound in the world’s stabilising mesh. It needs to be tended to and even though the protocols don’t explicitly state it, Tjaard feels he will need Inbal by his side.

Inbal shows him her fangs and the tip of her leash-like tongue when Tjaard asks her to go with him, but she stops mid-composition without having to be asked a second time. The human whose buttocks are marked with unfinished notes continues lying before the creature-human choir for their contemplation. How they are able to find the notes within themselves when the noise swallows everything but the midtones is a mystery to Tjaard, even taking into consideration the different range of human and creature voice.

Inbal’s voice is a high trill, not unlike the sound of Sacryn bells during Mass. She uses it sparingly and never without meaning, her sign to start moving now is simply a nod. A toad hops behind her as she searches for a discarded string from the harp to take with them. The paddock’s call always tells Inbal which strings to use for various projects, which she rewards with a good-natured tap from her tongue and a piece of fruit from the east.

There is only one way this undertaking will work, only one way that has been told to Tjaard: In order to step outside their world, they have to go to the one place in all the lands where no one can be observed. Tjaard has been observing creatures in every corner of the gardens and hills, the pits and the waters. The only place everyone seems to be strangely repulsed by unconsciously is the brittle inside of the eggman’s tree-like legs. He has never seen anyone even try to attempt climbing inside; all there is are shipwrecks repelled by what seems to be a force radiating from the legs that is as negative as the eggman’s upper body cavern is inviting.

They reach the river bank and Inbal waits close to the hole in the ice while Tjaard makes his way across it towards the splintered wood. He uses the planks and branches to try and scale one of the tree trunks, but his robe catches on twigs which seem to appear out of nothing and his hands won’t close. He awkwardly hangs by his elbows, his hood dangerously close to exposing the top of his head, and looks over his shoulder to Inbal.

The colour of the haze underneath the ice has intensified and the toad hop-sliding around on the ice is getting more and more agitated. Inbal holds Tjaard’s gaze and opens her mouth. The word she speaks sounds like a singular note at the start, but the longer she holds it the more nuanced it becomes. It bounces off the ice, multiplying even more, until the word has become a steady chord. When it reaches Tjaard, Inbal’s scales are a play of red on the haze and her corporal form flickers for just a moment.

Tjaard suddenly feels lighter, his hands can grip tighter, and an opening appears right above him in the smooth bark. There is a feeling of weightlessness, like he is being lifted towards the opening by the air around him.

Before he vanishes into the eggman’s leg, Tjaard glances at the world with its green grass and black smoke, all plays on the same motifs, like the high tone of the cymbal and the low beat of the drum, which have become so entangled now. Some of the humans and non-humans are bathing, some lift into the skies, some disappear inside a cave, all unconsciously scratch at the edges of their world.

Freeing oneself of the state of being observed doesn’t only require a spot where one is unobservable; it requires a willingness to let the inside connect with an outside unknown. Tjaard’s hands graze the damp and rotten wood inside the leg, feels it seep and soak and sink. He feels thirsty and the darkness around him seems to concentrate in a single spot somewhere inside his head. There is a pull and when Tjaard opens his eyes, the darkness has lightened.

Underneath him, a sphere floats effortlessly in an undefined space. The noise from his world is only a distant and discontinuous sound, dull, either wanting to grow into something or starting to ebb away. Through the noise’s pulse Tjaard is very aware of his own weightless body, without feeling like it has lost its substance. His blue robes still hold him, his mind still perceives the lands in all their states. The state he is looking at now is one he has not encountered before. It is devoid of almost all colour with a weird sort of pink-ish hue that reminds him of the fog wafting below the ice.

The sphere looks either unfinished or destroyed, the architecture rough. Everything is half- _something_ and pale. There is but one spot where the pink accumulates and Tjaard sees a dent next to where the fountain might be in the state he has just come from. It looks much fresher than other, smaller dents and by seeing it, Tjaard finds himself standing right next to it, following only the fluttering of eyes.

A deep groove has formed there, was formed by the key now half-hidden in mud, is further forming with every step Tjaard takes. Inside the groove, wet clay clings to the key. It makes a muffled, almost surprised sound; it is wetness in its primal form, holding onto everything foreign and similar, and in the next moment separating from itself and anything coming into contact with it. It makes Tjaard think about early forms of war, the desperate noises of flesh, the pain of things being taken away.

Despite this show of vigour, Tjaard knows he can retrieve the key from the clay and assesses the possibilities. There are no sticks here to help him angle for the key, and the harp string he left with Inbal. He cannot simply step into the mud because even though it appears solid when touched, it is liquid when moved about.

His ankles are firmly shrouded with a feathery band of pink fog, spanning the rim of the groove and extending in a line to a nearby river. Tjaard decides to crouch down and simply try to reach for the key without applying too much pressure on the solid surface.

Its grip is firm and Tjaard can also see how, once removed, the key will leave an impression in the clay. It could reasonably be used to create a duplicate, but it is not Tjaard’s mission to destroy whatever has been created. He just observes and ensures that of all possible things happening at once, exactly one thing _is_ happening.

He doesn’t know how things had been in what for the flock was the Before, but he had been told how, if there is no one there to observe anything, many things happening at once could lead to spontaneous apparitions of all sorts of things – or creatures. It is a question Tjaard might ponder when he will have brought back the key. For the moment, he is focusing his eyes on that very key he is slowly pulling out of the thick clay.

How or why it works he cannot tell. Looking back, the distance seems too large. He does hold the key in his hands now, though, and his muddy robe clings to him as if it has come alive. The substance in the groove releases a string of gurgles oscillating between curses and compliments.

The fog guides Tjaard towards the nearby river, which resembles the one near the eggman in all its courses. By the river bank, the fog has turned into a mist, clammy and coating his sticky robes. Tjaard expects the river to be almost slimy with pink goo; instead, when he touches the water, it is not viscous at all and has an airy, cloudy texture. Only a step away from him a silvery string sticks out of the water, upright and unbent.

Stepping into the riverbed immerses Tjaard up to his shoulders. He holds the key in both hands beneath his robes and wades through the mist towards the string. Oddly, it feels like walking through the grass between the soft hills near the great fountain.

The string is easily plaited around the key which Tjaard still partially hides in the folds of his robe. The moment Tjaard’s hands leave the metal to reach for the other end of the string, the mist grows denser and burns Tjaard’s eyes. He tries to blink it away along with the sinking feeling of failure he feels when the weight of the key is no longer there.

Blinking the fog out of his eyes delays the realisation he is standing in the shadowy winds of the tree-legs again. The feeling of weightlessness drips away, releasing a bubble only visible to some creatures. Inbal senses it and fixes her eyes upon Tjaard. Now he is being seen again and overwhelmed by the onslaught of light and noise and smell. He sinks to the ground, his head entirely exposed.

A croak makes him open his eyes again and he sees Ner standing over him with a light and the toad on her soulder. She points towards Inbal, who is still standing by the hole in the ice. When Tjaard realises she is pulling the harp string out of the hole, relief washes over him in a way that makes him want to succumb to little bubbles of giggles tickling inside his chest, the sort he has never felt before.

By the time Tjaard, Ner and the toad have crossed over to Inbal, she is holding the key. There is no mud tainting the metal, yet its shine is less metallic, covered with a layer of almost transparent pink. It looks protected and very much like a warning.

The flock acknowledge them with a collective nod as they watch how the key is being carried upstream. The closer they get to the horse’s skull, the less intense the noise becomes. Getting to the top of the pike is Tjaard’s task. The hood of his robe is still down and he feels the eyes of the flock upon him, upon his head. Something has changed, he thinks, something has left its mark that is not just mist or mud. The top of his head feels hot and he will later discover a weird sort of spot that won’t rub away.

The moment the key slips into its place again, the briefest silence disconnects the omnipresent noise from the ones detangling themselves from it: The cries of war and copulation, the songs of drunkards and seduction, the flapping of wings and fabric – all of these filter out and give their world’s humans and creatures back the sliver of a sense of 'where'.

Tjaard wraps his robe tightly around himself and relinquishes himself into the robes of the flock that wrap around him as well. Between the whispers of new fabrics, a name emerges and Tjaard will be known as Yasha from this moment on. 

Inbal wraps her tongue around a bagpipe and with the human-creature choir drawing new notes from their lips and gills and bodily openings, everything returns to its singular state.


End file.
